Trailer Week, Day Two - Boyz n the Hood, 1991
By Burbanked on Aug 22, 2006 in Movie Marketing 101, Movies, Trailers, Views and Reviews | 1,355 views |
Cuba Gooding, Jr. was 22 years old when he played Tré Styles in Boyz n the Hood - and if that seems old to be playing a high school kid, then consider that Gooding was only four days older than writer/director John Singleton. Singleton made a big splash with Boyz, a film debut every bit as incendiary as Spike Lee might have made - but infused with more heart and relatable character emotion than Lee’s managed to depict previously or since.
I had lived in L.A. just under two years when I saw this trailer for the first time, and I had no clue about the world that it depicts so brilliantly. The film puts you right into the heart of that world, and you’re made to feel just as trapped and terrified as the characters who inhabit it. We get a great sense of that from this trailer - scenes of casual violence; a young girl trying to do her homework, startled by gunfire; the desperation of parents whose children are on the edge of catastrophic violence every day.
It’s a shattering, stunning movie, all the more heartbreaking when we consider the amount of talent squandered in the intervening years by Gooding, Singleton and Ice Cube. That’s another advantage of watching these old trailers - to try and figure out how it all went wrong.
Watch the Boyz n the Hood trailer.
The Movie List has a dandy page with what they’ve termed Classic Trailers - “trailers which are no longer (or never have been) available on the ‘net, have been Re-encoded, in high resolution picture and sound, and made available for Movie-List users”. That list is where I got the trailers I’ll share with you this week. It’s certainly a list worth reviewing if you don’t happen to have these titles and their attendant bonus features on DVD.
Coming up tomorrow in Trailer Week: gee, strange that this one wasn’t a studio picture.
My blog-love affair with cartoonist Doug Savage’s terrific daily Savage Chickens (
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because clearly Cage has decided to become action/thriller cinema’s first Polish great-grandma. (
Well, that’s too bad. Back a year or so ago when I heard that they’d be making a movie out of Judi and Ron Barrett’s terrific kids’ book Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, I hoped maybe it’d be made live-action. Handled well, the idea of seeing an actual town where it rained hotdogs and baked beans in an open-roof restaurant, as well as the bit where sanitation trucks clean up all the leftover rain/snow/food and feed it to the pets would be, I thought, a bundle of CG-imbued cinema fun. 
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